20 Ingenious Ways People Told Time Before Modern Clocks

Fire alarm clocks. Yes, before we had alarm clocks, people used candles. These candles would have markings to show where each hour occurred, and based on a best guess of melting time, the user would poke a nail into the candle. Then, when it melted enough, the nail would fall. The nail landing in the tray underneath would make a loud noise alerting them to wake up. It was used in medieval Europe and in some parts of Asia.

The incense clock was once popular in China and neighboring countries. Incense, shaped into sticks or spirals, was designed to burn at a steady rate, with each section representing a certain number of minutes. More sophisticated models included different scents for each part of the day, so by merely smelling the air, one would know approximately what time it was.

My favorite item on the list is probably the Elephant Clock, built by the Muslim engineer Al-Jazari in the early 1200s. This massive contraption is essentially a water timer which drops a ball into a receptacle every half hour, which then triggers a small figure to strike a cymbal. All of this takes place in a giant model of an elephant. It’s just… magnificent.

I would have loved to see that: around 1090, the Chinese official/astronomer Su Song built a clock tower in China that was almost 40 feet tall. Powered by flowing water, it contained rotating star charts and had little wooden figures that came out to show the time, as well as bell-ringers and drummers that automatically went about their duties. The tower lasted only about 35 years before being dismantled during an invasion of the Song capital.

During the day, the Egyptians used the shadow clock: essentially, a standing stick to measure the movements of the sun. At noon, the clock would have to be rotated 180 degrees to follow the shadow of the afternoon. At night, priests would track time through the stars. So keeping time was a real job (at least a part-time one) for trained experts.

I don’t think I would’ve loved living in ancient Athens. Every speaker in a courtroom was given a water clock that would lose water from one container into another. Once the top container was empty, the individual was done speaking. If you needed to stop for any reason, you had to plug the clock so you would not lose your time. I ramble.

The nocturnal was a tool used from roughly the 1300s to the 1600s. To use it, a sailor would align it with both the North Star and a second star, and then could use the gap between the stars to figure out what time it was. One cloud, though, could ruin the perfect reading.

In Japan in the old days, an “hour” was actually a variable quantity. Daylight was divided into six equal parts, as was night. Clock makers would make specially crafted clocks which varied in speed to match this; the clocks would then have to be readjusted by the owner every two weeks. Summer days would mean an “hour” would last over 140 minutes, but winter days would see it shrink to a mere 95 minutes.

This strikes me as really funny: Roman sundials often had accompanying instructions, since a sundial built for one place on Earth will not be very reliable (sometimes not even a little reliable) if you take it somewhere else, and interpreting complicated sundials could require an expert. Apparently a Roman playwright cursed sundials, because they made him wait to eat until the sun allowed.

In cities such as Prague and Strasbourg, huge clocks were installed inside cathedrals. These timepieces would display not only the time of day, but also lunar phases and the liturgical calendar, and sometimes had animated displays of automated figures. These devices were so complex that specialized clockmasters were needed to maintain them, winding the mechanisms daily and keeping up with the near-constant maintenance the machinery demanded.

We get the saying “dog days” of summer from the Greek belief that the hottest, stickiest days of summer arrived when the bright star Sirius reappeared. In Egypt, its reappearance was a signal that the Nile River would soon be flooding, important (read: life or death) information to farmers.

Experts are still unsure what the tally marks on the Ishango bone were for. Some think that the Ishango bone is a primitive calculator while others think that it is a calendar of sorts. Either way, it’s really cool that humans could carve out the Ishango bone like this 20,000 years ago. The Ishango bone came from the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Newgrange, an ancient monument in Ireland, is aligned in such a way that on the winter solstice the morning sun shines directly down the long passage into the inner chamber, which is otherwise in darkness. This alignment happens only on mornings around the winter solstice each year. For ancient farmers, though, knowing when the shortest day had occurred was hugely important.

I love that in the 900s, a Chinese engineer named Zhang Sixun solved one of the major problems with water clocks by using mercury instead. Water freezes, and even before it does, flows differently in cold weather. Mercury still flows. This was a revelation to me. I didn’t know mercury was used in that context. I don’t think many people let it pool in their homes anymore, except perhaps in a few stubborn old thermometers.

Did you know that the astrolabe can also be described as an original smartphone?! The astrolabe is a flat, round disk, invented over 2,000 years ago, that helps to measure the position (or altitude, from the horizon) of the sun or stars. Using the astrolabe can help people figure out their latitude or their local time. Shout out to all Percy Jackson fans! I found this cool information while reading the Heroes of Olympus series.

The Antikythera mechanism is a 2,000-year-old mini-model of our solar system. It tracked the movements of the moon and planets. Divers pulled the artifact, a jumble of bronze gears, out of a shipwreck off the coast of Greece in 1901.

Think that screaming alarm clock is extreme? In China, messengers who had to be awake at a certain time would place a knotted cord, designed to burn very slowly, between their toes before bed. When it burned down, they got up. Who wouldn’t, honestly?

Apparently, the great Greek philosopher Plato hated oversleeping. So much so that he built an alarm clock using a water clock that whistles (via forcing air through a pipe), loud enough to wake his students for early morning classes. Great thinkers are just as annoyed by tardiness as the rest of us, it seems. And some struggles never change.

I think it’s important to laugh at how people used to tell time, because, I mean, ancient Egyptians didn’t have pocket watches! So, instead, the whole community had a big-ass spike, which, in the case of the ancient Egyptians, involved erecting a giant obelisk. That shadow would act as the clock, and they would know what time it was depending on where the shadow was. Except if you’re far away from the obelisk!

The hourglass could be used at sea, even when the ship was tossing. The main problem was making the hourglass, as the sand had to be kept perfectly dry, so it wouldn’t become a big clump. You only find references to hourglasses from the 1300s! I keep one to use for board games.

This content was created with the help of AI.